AUWCL Students Attend Annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference
Ten students from AUWCL recently attended the annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale University. Affectionately known as “RebLaw,” this is the 25th year that the conference “brings together practitioners, law students, and community activists from around the country to discuss innovative, progressive approaches to law and social change. The conference, grounded in the spirit of Gerald Lopez’s Rebellious Lawyering, seeks to build a community of law students, practitioners, and activists seeking to work in the service of social change movements and to challenge hierarchies of race, wealth, gender, and expertise within legal practice and education.”
Linda Sarsour, a founder of the Women’s March, welcomed students during the opening session with the reminder that social movements need law students “out in the streets as much as we need you in court.” A refreshing departure from the often sanitized legal curriculum, we spent the weekend learning about cutting edge public interest issues, networking, and co-conspiring with law students from all over the country. Some of the panels AUWCL students attended included: Digital Security and Self-Defense hosted by the Yale Privacy Lab, The Palestinian Exception to Free Speech, Lawyering in Solidarity with Sex Workers, Lawyering in the Black Radical Tradition, Democratizing the Law: The Muslim Ban Movement, Money and Finance in a Just Society, and Ending the Criminalization of Homelessness. Interested AUWCL students should definitely plan on attending RebLaw 2020 with the AUWCL Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild!